How to Spot Real Heresy

What Heresy Is

A heresy is not any teaching you disagree with. It is the denial of a truth so central that without it there is no Christian faith left. Peter called them damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them (2 Peter 2:1).

It helps to sort disagreements into three kinds.

1. Heresy. Denies the gospel or the God of the gospel. A man who holds it, and still clings to it after patient teaching and a first and second admonition, cannot be received as a brother in the faith, whatever he calls himself (Titus 3:10, 2 John 9-10).
2. Serious error. Wrong on an important teaching, and harmful to the church, but not a denial of the gospel itself. Worth contending about. Not a reason to call someone lost. How to Answer Arminianism and Pelagianism shows where those two fall.
3. Differences among the faithful. Questions on which godly, confessional Christians have disagreed for centuries, such as the millennium. Hold your view, and hold it charitably.

Calling a teaching heresy is a judgment about the teaching, measured by Scripture. It is not an infallible verdict on any person’s soul. A man may be confused, badly taught, or not yet corrected, and God alone knows the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). But to reject an essential truth knowingly and to go on rejecting it is no small thing. Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God (2 John 9). The church must judge what a man professes, and the final judgment of every soul belongs to God (Romans 14:10-12).

The Truths That Mark the Line

The early church settled these in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds and at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the Reformation recovered the gospel itself. Denying any of them is heresy.

1. One God in three persons. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory (WSC 6).
2. Christ fully God. The eternal Son, not a created being or a lesser god (John 1:1, Colossians 2:9).
3. Christ fully man. A true body and a reasonable soul, born of the virgin Mary (WSC 22, Hebrews 2:14-17, 1 John 4:2-3).
4. Christ one person. Two natures, not two persons, and not a mixture of the two (WCF 8.2).
5. His death for sinners and his bodily resurrection. If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain (1 Corinthians 15:17).
6. Salvation by grace alone through faith alone. Any message that makes our works part of the ground of our acceptance with God is another gospel (Galatians 1:6-9, Romans 3:28).
7. Scripture as God’s Word. A teaching that sets a new revelation or a church above Scripture cuts away the ground every other truth stands on.

Where It Shows Up

Some groups that use Christian words deny these truths in their official teaching.

1. Jehovah’s Witnesses deny the Trinity and teach that Jesus is a created being.
2. The Latter-day Saints teach that God was once a man and that there are many gods, and they add books to Scripture.
3. Oneness Pentecostals deny the Trinity and teach that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one person in different modes.
4. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that justification is by God’s grace and that no one can earn the grace by which it begins. But it teaches that justification is not only the forgiveness of sins but the inward renewal of the sinner, given at baptism, that the righteousness by which a man is justified is the grace God pours into him, and that this righteousness is increased by good works done in grace. The Council of Trent, whose decrees Rome still holds, condemned anyone who says a sinner is justified by faith alone or by the imputed righteousness of Christ alone (Session 6, canons 9, 11, 24). Scripture teaches that God justifies the ungodly by counting Christ’s righteousness to him, received by faith alone (Romans 4:5-6, Philippians 3:9). To deny that is to deny the gospel the Reformers recovered (WCF 11.1).
5. The prosperity gospel teaches that Christ died to buy health and wealth for those with enough faith, and that faith is a force men use to get what they want. That makes gain the reward of godliness and turns the gospel of grace into another gospel (1 Timothy 6:5, Galatians 1:6-9).

This is about what each group officially teaches, not a verdict on every person in it. God alone knows each heart, and people inside those groups need the gospel told to them plainly and kindly.

How to Respond

1. Know the truth well. The surest guard is a firm grasp of the Shorter Catechism and the Creeds. See Reformed doctrine. Counterfeits are spotted by those who know the real thing.
2. Earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3). Do not shrug off heresy as a difference of opinion.
3. Be gentle with the person. Paul says to instruct them in meekness, if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth (2 Timothy 2:25).
4. Do not give a heretic a platform. John told the church not to receive one who brings another doctrine of Christ or to bid him God speed (2 John 10).
5. Leave church discipline to the church. A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject (Titus 3:10). That is the elders’ work, not a private verdict.